As yet another war brews, it is as terrifying a time as ever to cast a flinching eye over the works of Otto Dix and his brutally honest portrayal of war.
His transition from a Fine Arts student at the Dresden Academy in Germany to a “revolutionary pacifist” was forged in the deep trenches of WW1. Carrying a Bible, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and a sketchbook, he fought on the front lines at the Somme and in Flanders. It was here where he began his sketches of rotten corpses and harrowing stormtroops that inspired his later work, and nightmares.
After the war Otto joined the First Dada Fair (a radical anti-art movement born from the horrors of the war) with his work War Cripples (1920). A harsh statement against the deluded visions of German veterans unaware that they are not the glorious heroes they think they are.
The only reason his art didn’t face more backlash was because at the same event, Rudolf Schlichter and John Heartfield hung a pig-faced effigy of a German soldier from the ceiling in direct defiance of the regime. In The Trench (1923) Dix created one of the most powerful anti-war statements in modern art. The painting, later confiscated by the Nazis, strips away the ‘heroic’ veneer often found in war art and replaces it with a charnel house of decomposing limbs and existential void.
Channeling his rage at the treatment of veterans into a sharp eyed satire of higher powers, Dix then created his masterpiece Metropolis (1927). Here, he uses the religious format of a triptych to contrast the glamorous, jazz fueled decadence of Weimar Berlin with the broken men it ignored. On the side panels, war cripples and sex workers ‘haunt’ the streets, whilst the elite dance at a cabaret in the centre.
Otto’s definitive work is The War Triptych (1929-32). In a haunting inversion of the holy altarpiece, Dix replaces the divine with a landscape of shattered limbs and gas-masked specters, sanctifying the agony of the common soldier. The rhythmic decay of the panels serves as a final, silent liturgy for a generation crucified not for salvation but for the hollow vanity of empire.
Dix’s refusal to sanitise history and paint a glorified version of war made him a primary target for the Third Reich. In 1934, he was banned from exhibiting art in Germany and 260 of his paintings were confiscated, featured in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and sold secretly in Zurich. Nevertheless, Dix still refused to yield to the party’s whims and subtly mocked the regime in The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) where Envy is depicted with the face of Hitler.
In a world that still seeks to legitimise Presidents through the glorification of conflict, Dix’s work remains a necessary, jagged mirror – reminding us that beneath the medals and the monuments, there is only the mud, the maggots and the lost.
Image by https://unsplash.com/photos/oLhTLD-RBscImage at the Wayback MachineGallery at the Wayback Machine
